


Building from Debris-Xylon and his Daemon Engines

by Lightbringer34



Series: The Sons of the Harvest: A Warhammer 40k story [3]
Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Character Study, Other, life on a Chaos Marine ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27662905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightbringer34/pseuds/Lightbringer34
Summary: A short character study of Warpsmith Xylon from my Sons of the Harvest Warband.
Series: The Sons of the Harvest: A Warhammer 40k story [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1836928
Kudos: 1





	Building from Debris-Xylon and his Daemon Engines

Warpsmith Xylon loathes Warp Storms more than anything else in the galaxy. His fellow members of the Sons of the Harvest find this peculiar because Warp Storms do not actively try to kill him. They reserve their hatreds for specific species, Chapters, or empires that had harmed them in the past. Half a Chapter of Space Marines with chips on their shoulders and a burning desire to take it out on anyone they dislike. In the beginning this made Xylon wary of crossing any of them, from the lowest battle brother to Lord Ausar, but now it just annoys him.

He particularly hates Warp Storms not because of the shrieks of the daemons outside the ship’s hull (interesting to listen to), or the turbulence shearing paint off everything not nailed down and many things that were (do these idiots not realize how hard it is to find red paint?), but because the storms always riled up the Daemon Engines.

As Warpsmith, it was his job to subjugate, command, and maintain the fusions of mechanical endurance with daemonic power. He could do all those things, but during a Warp Storm, things got tricky. Bindings that he’d layered upon each one for two years straight would loosen and the daemons would try anything to get free. The chains and pens they were bound with only allowed them so much movement, but too many of his thralls had died to chain link shrapnel for Xylon to assume the bonds would hold this time. So he journeyed down to the lower cargo decks, where lights were dim or nonexistent and ship-born thralls with varying degrees of mutation bowed as he passed. He would roll his remaining eye, but he was only there for the daemon engines.

The Forgefiend Subjugator, his earliest significant creation, drooled plasma residue when excited by the storms and he usually just plugged it into a wall-mounted power coupling to feed from the ship’s reactors, stroking the fleshy tendrils underneath the neck armor. It would croon in a deep, gargling way and nod off to sleep once more within the hour. In that sense she was easy to deal with. The Maulerfiends were much more of a problem, especially the Cog-Breaker.

Originally christened as “Nurgle’s Bane” for ploughing his way through a Great Unclean One, the bound Khornate Daemon was now known as Cog-Breaker after it tore an Imperial Knight in two, thirty years before. It alone had lasher tendrils and Xylon regretted it extremely, but the bindings and techno-organic growth had been set for far too long to change its armament now. The metal tentacles slid through the bars of Cog-Breaker’s cell and manhandled everything they could reach, crushing thralls in petulant amusement or pulling every lever in reach, which fortunately wasn’t much. Xylon had been forced to rewire and rebuild the entire space after the beast opened the cargo doors during a particularly violent warp storm and nearly flung them all into the Aether. Even a hundred years later, Xylon still suspected the beast had done it deliberately.

He usually exhausted the Cog-Breaker by enlisting the aid of Ex-Lord Ghur, Krosis’s mentor still interred in the Dreadnought chassis he had when the Chapter had been loyal, the Dreadnought that had been the first to choose Krosis for Chapter Master at the Council, and the Dreadnought chassis that had seen him through the civil war that followed. By some dark miracle of the Chaos Gods or some inherent warding etched into the adamantium plating, Ghur had not been corrupted by the Warp, had not even been touched by it. Xylon had been and still was perplexed at the phenomenon, but at Krosis’s urging, had added several of his own warding sigils to the Dreadnought that had proven to chase away possessive Daemons, from the Greater to the Lesser. It wouldn’t do the Ex-Lord any good if Skarbrand had decided on him for a new vessel, but Xylon doubted it. The well-known daemons largely stayed away from small fry like them. The Sons of the Harvest were a tough, hardscrabble group of men, women, and Marines who made do with what they had and what Xylon could forge for them. That was one reason he stuck around. They always presented him with such fascinating engineering challenges. That, and Ghur was good company.

As Xylon passed the Cog-Breaker’s cage, he turned to see the Dreadnought roll its front chassis forward into a vicious headbutt that dazed the much larger Cog-Breaker, only for the Ex-Lord to once again pull the binding chains tight around it. While it roared its displeasure at being immobile once more, it had lost enough fights against Ghur to know further resistance would only prompt further pain. Grumbling and snorting insults in what Xylon presumed to be its own personal daemonic tongue, the beast closed its eyes and resumed its own facsimile of slumber. Ghur lumbered out of the cage, raising a clawed fist in greeting.

“GREETINGS XYLON, LORD OF THE LOST AND MASTER OF THE MACHINES. HOW FARES YOUR WORK TODAY?”

Xylon shrugged one pauldroned shoulder and gestured for the Dreadnought to follow him.

“Very funny Ghur. I’m annoyed, I’m in need of a recharge, and I just know the Saint-Slayer will have caused half a dozen hull breaches once this storm stops. More busywork for me to complete instead of working to finish the second dammed Maulerfiend.”

They both pause as the entire ship rolls with the force of a warp tide. Ghur stays on his feet but Xylon loses both his balance and his magnetic bonding and crashes into the opposite cage. He is about to start cursing in three human languages and seven daemonic ones when a hopeful voice rises up out of the gloom.

“Is it time?”

Xylon sighs, he seems to be doing that a lot lately. He really should recharge.

“No Aleph, it is not. Go back to sleep.”

The voice remains sleepy, but Xylon knows the Hellbrute behind it is more than capable of waking all the way up in a flash if necessary.

“Have you seen my arms techmarine? The tech-priests have taken my arms. I cannot see them anymore.”

Xylon is more patient with the Hellbrutes than he is with the daemon engines. The beasts he created are malevolent and know their purpose. He built them and bound them that way. The Hellbrutes are ghosts, trapped in a body that has forgotten to die. He pities them, but will never say so aloud. Members of the Sons who had enraged their Lord or, captured Space Marines from the Fall of the Chapter, the Hellbrute sarcophagi are a special punishment Krosis has ordered Ausar to continue until they run out of Loyalist survivors or sarcophagi. Neither is likely to happen anytime soon.

“The tech-priests have gone to clean your arms, Aleph. They will be back soon.”

“Oh good”, pipes the Hellbrute. “They always oil the cabling so well.”

“I will tell them you appreciate it, now go back to _sleep_.”

Xylon layers the last word with an aura of Command and tech-screed from his mechanical half to drive the directive home. As he hears the resumption of the buzzsaw noise that was the amplified snore, he checks once again that Aleph Squad’s assigned Hellbrute was still missing its arms. A Plasma cannon and thrasher tendrils were not things you wanted active and attached to a Loyalist inside a Sons starship, no matter how drugged, confused, and manipulated the old fool was.

Satisfied with his inventory, Xylon and Ghur continued down the hall to the last cage, built twice as large and filling nearly half the cargo bay. Though neither of them could see their quarry, both knew the Heldrake could have been anywhere. The latest of the Daemon Engines to be built and the most powerful, Xylon had created something more intelligent than the others, capable of following orders and cognizant enough to recognize whom to kill. The very qualities that had given the Heldrake the name Saint-Slayer also made it the most difficult to cage in between battles. It had so far broken out of its cell twice, blasting out into the brief slipstream between the ship and the undiluted Warp to skim across the port side guns, turn well-trained gunnery crew into screaming torches of balefire, and play with the ship’s instrumentation antenna.

It is profoundly infuriating and also his finest creation. He does not tell Ghur as they both look at the smoking hole above them that he is as proud as a father with his firstborn daughter. The Saint-Slayer’s vast draconic head loops its way back into the room from outside the ship and chatters its teeth. Xylon is pretty sure it is laughing at him. In response, he plants his axe in the deck and makes the Sigil of Twelvefold Bindings with both his hands and two mechadendrites. The sigil’s energies grab the heldrake by its long neck and bodily drag it back into the cell, even as Ghur enters the cage with a massive sheet of admantium held in his claw.

“You truly are growing too big for this roost then, eh?” Xylon murmers as the mechanical dragon scrabbles on its wings to all fours and bares its teeth at him.

It learned very early on to never breathe flames at its master, and its hind claws will never fully grow back.

Xylon uses the Sixth Seal of Movement to drag his disobedient drake to its roost and he can tell it’s cursing him again as Ghur’s multi-melta plays over the edges of the now-sealed hole.

He waves a mechadendrite at it in acknowledgement. “My child, I told you before. If you could restrain yourself for six months, I would convince Ausar to give you the secondary transit shaft as your roost instead. Now you have to start all over again, and I’m probably going to have to train new gun crews.”

He lashes the Saint-Slayer with the Twenty-Second Seal of Punishment in retaliation. It growls, but stays hunkered down in its berth. It’s learning, good.

“And I hate training new gun crews.”

He looks fondly behind him to his workshop, where the mostly-finished chassis of another Maulerfiend sits, dormant and purely metal. No spark of daemonic life, troublesome or otherwise, flickers through it. Xylon wrenches his axe from the deck and tucks it onto his shoulder, moving back the way he’d come as Ghur ambles off to the cargo elevator, presumably off to his sleeping spot in the corner of the Combine’s poker room. Relentless at their game, the Son’s Terminator elite had been playing poker every Sunday for the last thousand years, about the only time Ausar or Xylon could convince them to remove their Terminator armor for repairs or upkeep.

For Xylon, it was a joy to work with the suits, never mind their foul smell that came from centuries of use in combat sites and the sweat of transhumans at a full run. Well, perhaps “run” was the wrong word. It was impossible to run in Terminator armor. The best Xylon had ever seen was a steady jog, and even that could only be maintained for a mile, the suit’s servos and transhuman muscle unable to drag the suit for longer. But still…

Xylon stared into the middle distance as his mind reimagined the blunt faceplates, turquoise eyes glowing as he fixed the damaged sensor systems from Giathua’s encounter with a Farseer or from Lady Ioreth’s fall down a mine shaft.

Warpsmith Xylon did indeed loathe Warp Storms, but the beings inside the ship kept things interesting enough for him to stick around.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago and might as well post it now. I was experimenting with tense usage here and imo, it doesn't flow as well as my other writing. Not sure if I can put a finger on why, though.  
> All the characters are models I own and have painted, all have their history of failures and triumphs across four editions of 40k now. (Though I haven't gotten to play a single game of 9th edition due to the pandemic. Haven't painted much either.)


End file.
